I have just read the book "Nature and Madness" by Paul Shepard.
It is an amazing book that really gets to the bottom of our cultural problems. Paul has carefully researched the evolution
of our culture for the last 10,000 years and has pinpointed one of the missing links in our cultural process.
We do not give the proper training for and experience of a rite of passage to our young adults in their late teens.
This is a requirement of the basic laws of this planet that youth be mentored through this kind of experience. A culture
that ignores this fact, will raise youth into adults that live in an adolescent or pre adolescent state of mind for their
entire lives.
I am not sure how we as adults would address this kind of missing link in our past.
The first step would be to acknowledge that there is a gap in our wholeness that may be connected to not having been brought
up closer to Nature. We would then as a group decide how we could make these deeper connections. Different people
may have different personal approaches which is fine. Just having an open forum about this subject may start the process
of the Universe coming to our assistance.
The books "Secrets of the Talking Jaguar" and "Long Life Honey in the Heart"
by Martin Prechtel shed light on this subject as well. These books give alot of information on the richness of the Mayan
Culture and their approach to raising their young and the process of becomming an elder in their society.
Here are a few quotes from Paul Shepards book:
"I shall .......... suggets that the only society more
frightful than one run by children, as in Golding's "Lord of the Flies", might be one run by childish adults."
"Culture, in racing ahead of our biological evolution,
does not replace it but is injured by its own folly".
"I felt that I had glimpsed a central figure of consciousness,
whose expressions in intelligence and speech appeared to be bound in each individual human emergence, as well as in that of
the whole species, to plants and animals."
"Child-rearing practices are not just one item in a list
of cultural traits. They are the very condition for the transmission and development of all other cultural elements,
and place definite limits on what can be achieved in all other spheres of history."
The book is a bit hard to read but it does illuminates the
problem. The thoughts of how to fix our culture are so complex. It almost seems like the culture
has to crash and humanity will have to restart to re establish the correct patterns of raising youth into vibrant adults.
There must be another way. We are intelligent beings and we don't have to keep going over the cultural waterfall
and crashing on the rocks below. We somehow have to get past all the cultural programming in our own heads to find the
opening in the mist where sanity lives. The answers are waiting, we just have to dig for them.
I feel that a complete examination of this issue will be essential in the Sage Valley Community. We
will be looking for ways to incorporate into our own lives the missing links of these rites of passage. It does not
mean that we will have to go through an intense physical process. I think we just need to address the issue and
find ways that work for us to achieve the answers.
